Media content identification from environmental samples is a valuable and interesting information service. User-initiated or passively-initiated content identification of media samples has presented opportunities for users to connect to target content of interest including music and advertisements.
Content identification systems for various data types, such as audio or video, use many different methods. A client device may capture a media sample recording of a media stream (such as radio), and may then request a server to perform a search of media recordings (also known as media tracks) for a match to identify the media stream. For example, the sample recording may be passed to a content identification server module, which can perform content identification of the sample and return a result of the identification to the client device. A recognition result may then be displayed to a user on the client device or used for various follow-on services, such as purchasing or referencing related information. Other applications for content identification include broadcast monitoring, for example.
Existing procedures for ingesting target content into a database index for automatic content identification include acquiring a catalog of content from a content provider or indexing a database from a content owner. Furthermore, existing sources of information to return to a user in a content identification query are obtained from a catalog of content prepared in advance.